When I walk the Street, and observe the Hurry about me in this Town,

  Where with like Haste, tho’ diff’rent Ways they run;
  Some to undo, and some to be undone; [2]

I say, when I behold this vast Variety of Persons and Humours, with the Pains they both take for the Accomplishment of the Ends mentioned in the above Verse of Denham, I cannot much wonder at the Endeavour after Gain, but am extremely astonished that Men can be so insensible of the Danger of running into Debt.  One would think it impossible a Man who is given to contract Debts should know, that his Creditor has, from that Moment in which he transgresses Payment, so much as that Demand comes to in his Debtor’s Honour, Liberty, and Fortune.  One would think he did not know, that his Creditor can say the worst thing imaginable of him, to wit, That he is unjust, without Defamation; and can seize his Person, without being guilty of an Assault.  Yet such is the loose and abandoned Turn of some Men’s Minds, that they can live under these constant Apprehensions, and still go on to encrease the Cause of them.  Can there be a more low and servile Condition, than to be ashamed, or afraid, to see any one Man breathing?  Yet he that is much in Debt, is in that Condition with relation to twenty different People.  There are indeed Circumstances wherein Men of honest Natures may become liable to Debts, by some unadvised Behaviour in any great Point of their Life, or mortgaging a Man’s Honesty as a Security for that of another, and the like; but these Instances are so particular and circumstantiated, that they cannot come within general Considerations:  For one such Case as one of these, there are ten, where a Man, to keep up a Farce of Retinue and Grandeur within his own House, shall shrink at the Expectation of surly Demands at his Doors.  The Debtor is the Creditor’s Criminal, and all the Officers of Power and State, whom we behold make so great a Figure, are no other than so many Persons in Authority to make good his Charge against him.  Human Society depends upon his having the Vengeance Law allots him; and the Debtor owes his Liberty to his Neighbour, as much as the Murderer does his Life to his Prince.

Our Gentry are, generally speaking, in Debt; and many Families have put it into a kind of Method of being so from Generation to Generation.  The Father mortgages when his Son is very young:  and the Boy is to marry as soon as he is at Age, to redeem it, and find Portions for his Sisters.  This, forsooth, is no great Inconvenience to him; for he may wench, keep a publick Table or feed Dogs, like a worthy English Gentleman, till he has out-run half his Estate, and leave the same Incumbrance upon his First-born, and so on, till one Man of more Vigour than ordinary goes quite through the Estate, or some Man of Sense comes into it, and scorns to have an Estate in Partnership, that is to say, liable to the Demand or Insult of any Man living.  There is